Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  On 11 July 1936 the Obersalzberg Porsche was finally in a position to present Hitler with two prototypes. On this occasion Hitler set the price for the car at 990 RM, although there was no actual calculation to underpin this, and he decreed that an independent company (and not, as originally envisaged, the automobile industry) would produce the cars at a dedicated factory. It was to have the first batch of 100,000 cars ready after only nine months, after which it must produce 300,000 cars per year. A possible location, Hitler said, was the area around the River Elbe in central Germany. Start-up finance would be needed from a wealthy partner. The car would then be on the market in time for the International Automobile Show in 1938.17 A good two weeks later the leaders of the automobile industry had been made aware of these key dates,18 although now the anticipated price had been raised to a maximum of 1200 RM. The, to put it mildly, less than enthusiastic response of the industry to the prospect of competition from a state-sponsored mass-produced car seems at first to have put a question mark over the venture. Hitler at any rate criticized the industry’s resistance to it quite sharply in his speech at the 1937 Automobile Show.19 By this time, however, he had found the partner he needed with the necessary finance for the project. The German Labour Front (DAF ) would not only advance the money for the factory but also take on the marketing of the Volkswagen.20 After personally deciding on the location,21 on 26 May 1938 he finally laid the foundation stone at Fallersleben in Lower Saxony for the works where what was now called the ‘Strength through Joy [KdF] car’ would be built.22 Insufficient progress was made before the outbreak of war, however, and instead during the war a light jeep was built as a military version, an option Hitler had kept open from the start.23

  The fact that Hitler made crucial decisions concerning the mass production of the Volkswagen in the summer of 1936, at a stage when a serious crisis was looming in the supply of raw materials, in particular steel and petroleum, the fact too that in the years following he promoted the project and doggedly pushed ahead with it,24 even though it was bound to divert resources from the armaments programmes, calls for an explanation. Hitler’s main objective with the Volkswagen project, and with the motorway project25 that ran parallel with it and consumed a great deal of money, was to gain credence through concrete measures for the vision he was repeatedly conjuring up of a nation that was motorized. The long-term perspective was crucial here. In the course of 1936 he gave unmistakable indications that he was expecting a major military conflict at the beginning of the 1940s.26 The motorization of the masses, however, and the completion of the motorway network (for which there was no immediate military need) were goals for the period ‘afterwards’. In the later 1930s the Germans could not fail to see the massive preparations for war and were therefore deeply worried. These projects were designed to give the population the idea of a future that would be characterized by prosperity, consumer power, and a significant degree of individuality. If resources had to be diverted from rearmament, that for Hitler was secondary. In addition, the numbers of vehicles envisaged for the future and conjured up by Hitler in his Automobile Show speeches (in 1936 it was three to four million, in 1938 six or seven) show clearly that he was not aiming for a general motorization but rather that he wanted above all to create a status symbol for the middle classes.

  At the same time that rearmament was at its height, the regime was promoting other ‘people’s’ products in addition to the Volkswagen, such as the ‘people’s fridge’, as consumer goods for the more affluent middle classes. Only the ‘people’s radio’ was fairly successful.27 Even the subsidised mass tourism provided by Strength Through Joy principally benefited white-collar workers, civil servants, and small businessmen. With rearmament as the main focus of the economy it was impossible to move towards mass consumerism encompassing all sections of the population. The regime’s strategy of boosting consumer goods was thus mainly aimed at the future.

  On 17 June Hitler appointed the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, ‘Reich SS Leader and Head of the German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior’.28 In taking this step shortly after delegating special authority to Göring in economic matters, he was conferring blanket powers on another, in his eyes particularly dependable, leading functionary and laying the foundation for a police force that had been removed from the regular state administration and had become closely linked to the SS. For, in spite of the choice of title, Himmler was in practice to ignore any connection with the Interior Ministry and receive his instructions from Hitler, to whom he was directly responsible as head of the SS. By dividing the police and placing the two sections under new ‘head offices’, the Security Police under Reinhard Heydrich and the Order Police under Karl Daluege, he created an organization that foreshadowed the desired conflation of SS and police.29

  By 1936 the Gestapo, Himmler’s main sphere of operations up to this point, had largely fulfilled its primary task of smashing the communist underground. On the alert for new responsibilities, Himmler now set about changing the Gestapo’s focus to so-called preventative action against the opposition, a development with far-reaching consequences, for which he had already obtained Hitler’s approval in principle in October 1935.30 The aim, as Hitler and the new police chief agreed every time they met, was to track down ‘intriguers’, ‘agitators’, and ‘subversive intellectuals’. They did not assume that such people were to be found only in left-wing circles but also among Freemasons, clergy with a ‘political agenda’, and above all among the Jewish population. The Gestapo now began to clamp down even on low-level opposition. From now onwards people who spread rumours or jokes, or who voiced criticisms or dissatisfaction in their daily lives were in the authorities’ sights. Clearly this change in police work was directly linked to the Prussian administration’s decision in April to cease its ‘reports on the public mood’. Instead of discontents being noted so that they could influence political decision-making, the police were to attribute deteriorations in mood to particular groups or individuals and proceed against them. In a parallel initiative the new police chief, Himmler, refocused the activities of the criminal police from 1936 onwards on ‘preventative crime-fighting’, which to the Nazi mind meant the ‘eradication’ of marginalized social groups, who were regarded as carriers of allegedly inheritable ‘asocial’ characteristics and a tendency towards criminality. Thus a disparate collection of ‘subhumans’ found themselves in the firing line of the Gestapo, criminal police, and general police. All these developments amounted to one thing: arbitrary rule by the police.31

  Figure 6. Control and surveillance could not prevent all public protest. In Essen in 1937 this highly visible slogan, ‘Down with the Labour Service and remilitarization’, was difficult to remove and so the lettering was distorted to make it illegible.

  Source: Anton Tripp/Fotoarchiv Ruhr Museum

  To this end Himmler set about the reform of the concentration camp system in the second half of 1936. Up until the summer of 1937 he had been gradually replacing small camps, with the exception of Dachau, with larger ones. In July 1936 work began on Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin and a year later the construction of Buchenwald was started and Dachau was extended.32 This enlargement of the concentration camp network was clearly carried out with a view to a future armed conflict. At the beginning of 1937 Himmler announced that ‘in the event of a war we must be clear that we shall be forced to put a significant number of unreliable types into them’.33 Consequently the camp system was designed to take between 30,000 and 50,000 prisoners.34 After the reform there was no change to the arbitrary practice of sentencing people to protective custody or to the use of terror inside the concentration camps. In November 1935, after Frick, the Interior Minister, made a complaint, Hitler stated unequivocally that he did not wish to see any change in the arrangements. Thus in Hitler’s Germany it remained the case that anyone at all could be locked up, without legal proceedings or legal assistance and without any concrete evidence of a crime having been committed, and exposed to the most ap
palling torture even to the point of death.35

  A new alliance

  Hitler saw Mussolini’s victory against Abyssinia in May 1936, his annexation of the country, and his proclamation of the King of Italy Emperor of Abyssinia as an opportunity to make a lasting change in power relations in Europe. On the one hand, he hoped to achieve a closer relationship with Italy’s humbled opponent, Great Britain. Thus Goebbels records the ‘Führer’s’ immediate reaction to the ‘Duce’s’ triumph as being that Mussolini’s ‘drum-banging’ was ‘very useful for us’, for ‘it will lead to the alliance of the two Germanic nations’.36 The ultimate outcome that might emerge from such an alliance, as Hitler told Goebbels at the end of May, was a ‘United States of Europe under German leadership’.37

  On the other hand, as a result of the Abyssinian conflict Mussolini appeared to be more or less isolated internationally and found himself obliged to develop ever closer ties with Germany, as his January message regarding Austria and his neutrality concerning the occupation of the Rhineland had already made clear. At the end of March 1936 a German–Italian police conference was held which concentrated on joint action against communism and Freemasonry, culminating in a treaty. In the spring of 1936 there were further visits in connection with other policy areas.38 In June 1936 Mussolini replaced his Foreign Minister Suvich, who advocated a policy of cooperation with France and Britain, with his son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano.

  In addition, during March and April Mussolini had withdrawn his support from the Austrian home defence forces, the Schuschnigg government’s most important internal instrument of power. Pressured by Mussolini, Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg felt obliged to reassess his country’s relations with the German Reich. Although the published part of the so-called July Agreement between the two countries envisaged Germany recognizing Austria’s sovereignty, at the same time the agreement committed the Austrian government to a political course determined by the principle that Austria was a ‘German state’.39 In an unpublished supplementary document it was agreed to lift restrictions on travel (that applied above all to the German imposition of the 1,000 RM visa on German visitors), to grant an amnesty to Austrian National Socialists in custody, and to include representatives of the ‘nationalist opposition’ in the Austrian government.40 Schuschnigg complied with the last stipulation as early as 11 July by appointing the military author Edmund Glaise-Horstenau and the diplomat Guido Schmidt, both ‘National Socialist agents’ to his cabinet.41 For Hitler, however, the agreement was no more than a starting point from which to undermine further the authority of the Austrian government and create the conditions for Anschluss. At the beginning of May he had told Goebbels: ‘We’ve got to maintain the tension in Austria and Czechoslovakia. We can’t let peace get established. We can only gain an advantage through turbulence. The wounds have to smart.’42

  In the summer of 1936 there also seemed to be some prospect of closer co-operation with Japan against their common enemy, the Soviet Union. In the spring of 1935 Ribbentrop – going against the stance adopted by the Foreign Ministry of promoting German–Chinese relations – appears already to have put out feelers to the Japanese.43 In October 1935 Oshima Hiroshi, the Japanese military attaché in Berlin, had produced proposals for an anti-Soviet neutrality agreement to which Hitler is believed to have agreed in principle at the end of November.44 This project had been pushed into the background mainly by domestic developments in Japan, where in February 1936 there was a revolt by the military, but in the summer of 1936 Hitler turned his attention to it again. Hitler’s fundamental rejection of the ‘yellow race’ did not affect his attitude to Japan. He admired the Japanese first and foremost as a fearless warrior nation that had special qualities because it had never been ‘softened’ by Christian influence and was the sole great power to have no Jewish minority.45

  Hitler outlined the long-term prospects for potential cooperation with Japan on 8 June 1936 to Papen, Ribbentrop, and Goebbels. ‘Führer sees conflict coming in the Far East,’ Goebbels noted. ‘And Japan will hammer Russia. And that colossus will start to wobble. And then our great moment will have arrived. Then we’ll have to grab territory to keep us going for 100 years. I hope we’ll be done then and the Führer will still be living. Let’s get started.’46 Hitler made these statements the evening before a meeting with the Japanese ambassador at which mutual assurances were again exchanged that Bolshevism represented a common threat. It was impossible, Hitler said, to ‘reject communism as an ideology and at the same time maintain friendly relations with Soviet Russia’.47

  On 8 July he received Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in Tokyo, and asked about Japan’s reliability as an ally. Dirksen replied positively.48 On 22 July Hitler and Ribbentrop met Oshima in Bayreuth. Without going into detail Hitler indicated at this meeting that he would support a German–Japanese agreement49 and a few weeks later Ribbentrop, who had been given responsibility for further negotiations, was able to report that agreement in principle had been reached with the Japanese.50

  During his regular summer attendance at the Bayreuth Festival and only a few days after his meeting with Oshima, Hitler made a further momentous policy decision.51 On 17 July 1936 officers in Spanish Morocco had rebelled against the left-wing popular front government in Madrid. Although the conspirators had little trouble gaining the support of Spanish forces in North Africa, they failed in their attempt to spread the rebellion quickly to the home country. The coup was in danger of collapse if aircraft could not be found immediately to transport the Spanish Africa troops to the European mainland.52 The leader of the coup, General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde turned for help to the German government, many of whose members were in Bayreuth at this time, from where they were following events in Spain with great interest.53 On 25 July Hitler granted an audience to two envoys from Franco, expatriate Germans and Franco sympathizers, and at the following night-time meeting he tasked Göring and Blomberg with supporting the coup, in particular by sending transport planes.54

  This decision, taken, as in the case of the negotiations with Japan, without the involvement of the Foreign Ministry, was motivated by a number of considerations. Hitler regarded intervening in Spain first and foremost as an opportunity to inflict a defeat on World communism and to use support for Franco to develop a shared German–Italian policy and so strengthen the alliance with Rome. Göring was the man holding the various strings of Germany’s intervention policy and his main concern was to test out the capability of his air force, while in his capacity as ‘Commissar for Raw Materials’ securing access to vital raw materials (particularly iron ore and iron disulphide) in return for Germany supplying weapons.55

  Before the end of July Luftwaffe transport planes began to fly Spanish rebel units from North Africa back home, while German ships carried the first German troops to Spain. All of this was kept largely secret. At first the German units were forbidden to take an active part in the fighting, for incidents were to be avoided during the Olympic Games,56 and only when the Games were over at the end of August did Hitler lift restrictions on the deployment of German troops. At the same time, he created elaborate smoke screens on the diplomatic front. In August Germany joined an arms embargo initiated by France and since September had been taking part in the conferences of an international non-intervention committee.57 During the following months this new direction in foreign policy led to the subject of ‘Anti-Bolshevism’ being given even greater prominence in German propaganda.

  These decisions – rapprochement with Italy, still largely isolated as a result of Abyssinia; the resulting increase in German influence in Austria; the co-operation with Japan against the Soviet Union; the intervention in the Spanish Civil War as a German contribution to the fight against international ‘Bolshevism’ – that Hitler initiated in the summer of 1936 and that determined the regime’s direction make clear how far he had already broken free of the Foreign Ministry’s traditional revisionist policies and begun to establish a new position for German
y among the major powers.

  Summer Olympics

  The summer Olympic Games, held between 1 and 16 August in Berlin, offered the regime a unique opportunity, in spite of the occupation of the Rhineland and intervention in the Spanish Civil War, to parade itself before the world’s media as a peace-loving member of the family of nations and as a contented people, united behind their ‘Führer’.58 The ‘Olympic Ideal’ gave the Nazis plenty to work with. The Games were used in propaganda to support a massive campaign to improve and to glorify physical fitness. The still relatively strong military element in many sports such as riding, fencing, shooting, or the modern pentathlon suited the regime’s purposes, as did the emphasis on the classical world through references to the Ancient Greek Olympic tradition. The famous torch relay, carried from Olympia to Berlin 3,000 kilometres away, was staged for the first time in 1936. Typically, the torch’s arrival was celebrated by uniformed members of the Hitler Youth and SA in a ceremony of ‘dedication’ in the Lustgarten.